Our homes should bring a sense of comfort, ease, and security. Modern life sometimes gets in the way of these. Knowing how to protect your home—and your family—from the threats of modern life is essential.
These products and lifestyle tips herein will help piece together a more holistic approach to keeping your house healthier. This includes healthier food, healthier activity, and—the one most homeowners overlook—a healthier living environment.
Don’t Track in Dirt
Our shoes get dirty throughout the day. Whether you’re walking on pavement, hiking trails, or just scooting around the office—the bottoms of your shoes are picking up a sample of everything! Establishing a “no-shoes” policy in your home can help to limit the amount of outside contamination you bring into your home. This will help you in creating a healthy home.
This can help reduce bacteria, fungus, and other potentially harmful compounds from making their way into your home. Having a shoe rack next to the entrance of your door can help remind your family to change into their indoor shoes when arriving home.
Purify Your Home’s Air
Air purifiers can help remove airborne toxins like mold spores, dust mites, and toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs). If you have an HVAC system, it would be prudent to install MERV or HEPA rated filters. To take things one step further, however, installing additional air purifiers throughout your home can help limit the overall particulate count considerably.
Air purifiers come in a range of choices. There are air filters, air purifiers, air scrubbers, and air ionizers. To some degree, these terms are synonymous. However, there are some important distinctions to make. Air filters generally use a fan to force air through a filter that catches particles. This is ideal for dust and larger particle matter. Other products such as ionic air purifiers use electrical current to scrub the air. This addresses finer particles and even gasses like VOCs and endotoxins.
Washing Your Hands
As simple as this may sound, establishing a more rigorous hand-washing routine can have a tremendous impact on family health. Hot water, soap, hand-sanitizer—these are a few of the most-effective means of reducing infectious germs in the home. Good times to wash your hands include when you first get home, after eating, after any trip to the bathroom, and before food preparation. These simple times are the highest-risk for spreading infection.
Drinking Filtered Water
Municipal water uses a medley of toxic compounds like Chlorine to ensure that potentially deadly pathogens aren’t able to colonize. This is great for reducing bacterial risk but absolute garbage for providing quality, toxin-free water supplies. Wash your hands with city water, water your garden with city water, but do not—under any circumstances—drink city water!
There are dozens if not hundreds of harmful compounds found in municipal water supplies. These include things like trichloroethylene, benzenes, and chlorines. Aside from the known compounds, trace amounts of anything residents are putting down their sinks and drains may show up in trace amounts. You can protect yourself from such toxins by making it a habit to drink purified or spring water. Water delivery services provide a convenient way to ensure your family has access to safe, pure, and toxin-free water.
Watch Out for Mold
Mold from water damage or overly humid environments can quickly lead to mold issues in homes. The impacts of mold on health are not well-known yet—but what we do know is bad. Acute exposures to mold cause severe issues like respiratory infections, cognitive impairment, and can even lead to death. Chronic, low-level exposures, to the biotoxin compounds produced by mold, are lesser studied, however.
These types of harmful compounds may be produced from unseen mold growing behind walls, in crawlspaces, attics, or even seeping through foundation walls. Closely monitoring your home’s humidity can help lower the risk of mold. Another prudent step is to develop a monthly mold-killing routine. This can include mold-fogging, surface scrubbing, and should probably start with a mold inspection.
A Healthy Home is a Happy Home
These are only a few ideas on how to create a cleaner, healthier home for you and your family. Modern life is full of unseen and unrecognized threats to our health. Whether these threats are from bacteria on the ground, toxins in our water, or VOCs in the products we buy—it’s prudent to always be on the lookout. Addressing as many issues as one can help provide the comfort of knowing your family is safe from toxins, at least as much as you are capable of helping them to be!
